I don't even understand how they track these people down, how can they be sure a certain IP address is downloading their content, then beyond that how can you be sure which person it is that lives in a house, could be five guys sharing a computer in a house? Does this stuff actually make it to court, and if so, I wonder how much money they are fined, the cost of the game or some huge amount like a half a mil....

They are right to not sue really. All it will do is make the average guy more curious as to how and where to get it for free and it'll all go down hill after that. It wasn't till Metallica started suing their fans and the pirates that Napster went from popular service for the geeks and semi-geeks to anyone with a net connection grabbing tunes. I can see the same thing happening here.

I don't even understand how they track these people down, how can they be sure a certain IP address is downloading their content, then beyond that how can you be sure which person it is that lives in a house, could be five guys sharing a computer in a house? Does this stuff actually make it to court, and if so, I wonder how much money they are fined, the cost of the game or some huge amount like a half a mil....

They collect the IP addresses from those seeding torrent files, for example, then they subpoena the ISP for records on who was using that IP address at the time of the infringement. 99% of the time the ISP receives a complaint and either they contact the user to tell them to stop, or they do nothing.

In a manner of speaking; if things had gone the sueing route (outside the fact that many recipients can be in countries for which US courts have no legal jurisdiction, or power to coerce someone to appear); if things went such a strong arm tactic, some could design as "feature" clients which spoof an IP address while allowing an internal mapping (on an over-seas server in a country with no legal responsibility to appear to a US court) to deliver it to the right place. The logs could be routinely purged, and not archived for posterity.

The days I was taking network security. We had classmates, who for some class assignments had the idea of turning a class assignment into a spoofed telnet server, which looks legit to point of asking for username and password (it wasn't one, and no real login); and then just let people to a command prompt on any input, while logging whatever they typed to a text file for latter viewing.

Hell, it was the suites of Napster which resulted in things going to a more distributed and de-centralized approach. Almost proxy servicing the IPs/mapping them out, while spoofing fake ones to be displayed to clients/put in the download tracker would be sorta a next logical step to that. And if the mapping file is routinely purged, so old mapings don't persist in record...

They collect the IP addresses from those seeding torrent files, for example, then they subpoena the ISP for records on who was using that IP address at the time of the infringement. 99% of the time the ISP receives a complaint and either they contact the user to tell them to stop, or they do nothing.

And if ea takes the ip owner to court, how will they prove he did the actual downloading? Based on assumption?

I am on strike 2 from my ISP for using torrents. One more and they will disconnect my connection. But lately they have been lenient in the use, since I guess everybody is using it these days(legally or otherwise)